Judith Shulevitz
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Judith Shulevitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I mean, if you have a fabulous Jewish or Christian education, maybe you do know what you're supposed to feel, but you might not feel it for a long time. It might be alien to you. It's by doing that we learn. It's by doing that the meaning sort of yields itself up to us.
But if we have preconceived notions about what it means to go to services, what kind of person that makes you, if we have preconceived notions about how far we are from this tradition, then the words will be alien and repugnant, I think, to us. So I think the hardest thing is having patience.
tolerating the alien and the somewhat alienating experience of going to a place that you're not familiar with, you feel like an outsider, you don't know the words, you don't know Hebrew, you don't know the tune of the hymns, if it's a church, and just saying, okay, this is okay. And maybe if I do it a few times, it will start to become more familiar.
Or maybe first the social piece will come, and then I'll keep doing it, and it will start to feel more familiar. One of the things the Sabbath does is make time for study and maybe you'll learn more about what these things mean. But, you know, you're never going to get to this place of total meaning. You're never really going to get there. It's impossible.
So the first time I ever wrote about this, the only thing that came to mind was a line from The Cat in the Hat, which is, it's fun to have fun, but you have to know how. You can't get what you need from a Sabbath if you don't prepare for it. If you want more than the normal mysticism...
You need to elaborately prepare the meal, but you need to prepare it in advance so that you can relax and enjoy it. I mean, that's the sort of utilitarian notion of it. The more religious notion would be that you are doing it because God commanded you to do it. You don't necessarily always know why, but God commanded it. But, you know, you have to shop. You have to cook.
You might want to make plans with someone in advance. You invite people over. You have to make a challah. It's a Jewish Shabbat. And you have to do the preparation, which is also a preparation. You're preparing yourself to have this experience. You're not going to have the experience if you don't make it.
You are part of a community that's doing it, but it's not that the community gives you the meal. It's not that the community gives you the bath. So a Shabbos bath is very important. The mystics made a really big deal of this. In fact, one of the Kabbalists had a theory that your fingernails and your toenails were emanations of God.
So you should always pair your fingernails and toenails and keep the pairings and bury them, not throw them away. But this is this idea of preparing your body, preparing your meal, preparing your home. You're supposed to clean your home. This one way in which the Puritans were very Jewish. They believed in having a full larder, taking a bath and cleaning the home before their Sabbath.
And they understood this idea that it's just not going to have that special quality unless you prepare for it.
Well, who doesn't? So if you were an ultra-Orthodox Jew, I think there would be aspects of it that you would chafe under, right? Yeah. Everybody chafes under rules and regulations.
Another reason I wrote this book is that I wanted to write about the Sabbath from the point of view of an American who innately is suspicious of rules and regulations, who fiercely wants to defend her individuality, who wants to be part of American society, didn't want to be separated from it. But there are these contradictions. There's always going to be these conflicting impulses.
And I write about how I'm fundamentally ambivalent toward the Sabbath because there's a lot of times I don't want to do it. And it can be as negative an experience as it can be a positive one. But it's like anything else. It's like writing, for example. You know, you sit down, you don't want to write, but you got to write. And there will be three hours when it's a slog.
And that one hour when your mind opens up and you're in the flow and you get it, you
get well you've created the schedule where you have to sit at your desk from nine to one or whatever it is as unpleasant as that may be as many conflicts as there may be and nothing good is easy you have to kind of work for it you have to work not to work in this case you have to work to get to the experience of flow to get the experience to the experience of god to that get to that sort of what emile durkheim the sociologist who by the way came from a family of rabbis
called effervescence, which is that sort of collective joy, you're not always going to like it. Now, if you can't ever like it, you're not going to do it.
Absolutely. I find it to be true. And I find it to be particularly true in New York.
Why?
Because there's always this hubbub. There's always noise. People are always going somewhere. So the only time I've really found it to be a kind of natural experience was in Israel, where they really do have these Saturday closing laws, and there are fewer cars on the road, and there's less public transportation. And, you know, it's changing. But there is this kind of quietness in the street.
So you don't feel like you're fighting against society in the same way. And I think you are here. We have essentially lost this idea. Now, you have to remember that America is fundamentally a Sabbatarian nation. The Puritans founded this country in part so that they could keep their very strict Sabbaths as they wanted to and as they felt they were unable to in England.
Showing 61–80 of 125 · page 4 of 7
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